Under the Influence Read online

  She didn’t just go see Bud that one time, either. Ava followed up. I used to say about Ava that she was the most loyal friend a person could ever have. If Ava took a person on as a project, she was there for life.

  “You’ll never get rid of me,” she told me once. As if I’d ever want to.

  4.

  I met the Havillands around Thanksgiving, at a gallery opening in San Francisco for a show of paintings made by emotionally disturbed adults. I was moonlighting to make a little extra cash, working for the caterer. I had turned thirty-eight two months earlier, had been divorced five years, and if you’d asked me that day to name one good thing about my life, I would have been hard-pressed to come up with an answer.

  That gallery opening was an odd event, a fundraiser for a mental health foundation. The majority of the people in attendance that night were the emotionally disturbed artists and their families, who also seemed a little disturbed. There was a man in an orange jumpsuit who couldn’t look up from the floor and a very small woman in pigtails and a great many plastic barrettes clipped to her bangs, who talked to herself nonstop and periodically whistled. Not surprisingly, Ava and Swift stood out in the crowd, though Ava and Swift would have stood out in any crowd.

  I didn’t know their names yet, but my friend Alice, who was working the bar, did. I noticed Swift first, not because he was conventionally handsome, or even close to it. A person might actually have described Swift as one of the homelier men she’d ever seen, but there was something fascinating about his homeliness—something primal and wild. He had a compact, muscular body and crazy dark brown hair that stood out in various directions. He had a dark complexion and large hands, and he wore blue jeans—some very well-cut brand, not Gap or Levi’s, and his hand rested on the back of Ava’s neck in a way that spoke of more intimacy than if he’d been touching her breast.

  He was leaning close to Ava, saying something in her ear. Because she was sitting, he was bending over, but before he spoke, he had buried his face in her hair and lingered there for a moment, as if breathing her in. Even if he had been here alone, I would have recognized him as the kind of man who would never have noticed or paid attention to me. Then he was laughing, and he had a big laugh, more like a hyena than a person. You could hear it all the way across the room.

  I hadn’t spotted the wheelchair at first; I thought she was just sitting down, but the crowd parted and I saw her legs, immobile, in her silver silk pants, the exquisite slippers that never touched the floor. You wouldn’t call her beautiful in the usual way, but she had the kind of face that people notice: large eyes, big mouth, and when she spoke she moved her arms like a dancer; the arms were long and lean, with every muscle defined as rope. She wore oversize silver rings on the fingers of both hands, and a thick silver bracelet that wrapped around her wrist like a handcuff. I could tell that if she were able to stand she’d be very tall—taller than her husband, probably. But even seated, you knew this was a powerful woman. That chair of hers was more like a throne.

  Occupied as I was that night with my trays of appetizers, I allowed myself to consider, briefly, what it would be like to experience this crowd from the low elevation she did—with her face reaching to around chest level of most of the people surrounding her. If this bothered her, she betrayed no sign. She sat very straight in her chair, and she held herself like a queen.

  I guessed that she was probably about fifteen years older than me, in her early fifties. Her husband—though he was in good shape, with taut skin and an abundance of hair—looked to be closer to sixty, which turned out to be right. I remember thinking, I’d like to look like that woman when I’m older, though I knew I wouldn’t.

  For my day job at the time I worked as a portrait photographer, which was a fancy way of describing hours spent standing behind a camera—in schools, malls, event venues—trying to coax smiles out of bored-looking businesspeople and recalcitrant kids. The hours were long and the pay was low. Hence my occasional catering gigs. Still, I was pretty accurate in my assessment of faces, and I knew the story with mine. Small eyes. A nose that is neither large nor small, but lacking definition. My body has always been normal weight, but nothing to write home about. Going on from there to the rest of me—hands, feet, hair—I’d have to say there is not one memorable thing about my appearance—which may be why even people who’ve met me several times often forget that they have. This made it all the more surprising that of all the people she might have spoken to in the gallery that night, Ava chose me.

  I was circulating with a tray of spring rolls and Thai chicken skewers when she looked up from the canvas she was studying.

  “If you were going to buy one of these artworks, knowing you’d be looking at it on your wall every day for the rest of your life,” she said, “which would you choose?”

  I stood there holding my tray as a blank-faced man (probably autistic) reached for his fourth or fifth skewer, dipping it into the peanut sauce, taking a large, messy bite, then dunking again. Some people might have been put off by this, but Ava was not that type. She dipped her spring roll into the bowl right after he did and finished the whole thing in a single bite.

  “It’s a hard choice,” I said, looking around the gallery. There was a portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald, made on a piece of wood, with a long string of words written on the bottom that made about as much sense as a shopping list merged with your old chemistry textbook from high school. There was a sculpture of a pig covered in a bright pink glaze, with half a dozen smaller ceramic pigs, also bright pink, arranged around the pig as if suckling. There was a series of self-portraits of a large woman with bright orange hair and glasses—crudely done, but so successful in their evocation of their subject that I had spotted the artist immediately when she entered the room. The piece I liked best, though, I told Ava, was a painting of a boy pulling a wagon, which held a boy holding a similar but smaller wagon, with a dog in it.

  “You’ve got a good eye,” she told me. “That’s the one I’m buying.”

  I looked down, too self-conscious to meet her gaze, though I had taken in the sight of her enough to know she was an extraordinary-looking person: that swanlike neck of hers, the smooth, tawny skin. I felt at that moment the way a child might when a teacher praises her. The kind of child who doesn’t often meet with praise.

  “I’m biased, of course,” she added. “I’m a dog person.” She extended her hand. “Ava,” she said, looking straight into my eyes as few people did.

  I told her my name, and though I hardly ever admitted this to anybody anymore, I said that I was a photographer. Or had been. Portraits my specialty. What I really liked to do, I said, was tell stories with my photographs. I loved telling stories, period.

  “When I was young, I thought I’d be someone like Imogen Cunningham,” I told her. “But this is more my calling.” I gave a rueful laugh, inclining my head toward the empty canapé tray.

  “You don’t want to put that negative energy out there,” Ava said. Her voice sounded kind, saying this. But firm. “You have no idea what you may be doing a year from now. How things can change.”

  I knew how things could change, all right. Not for the good, in my case. There had been a time when I lived in a house with a man I believed I loved, who loved me back, I thought, and a four-year-old boy for whom my daily, hourly presence was so apparently essential that he had once tried to make me promise that I wouldn’t ever die. (“Not for a long time,” I told him. “And by the time I do, you’ll have some really terrific person in your life who loves you just as much as me, and kids, maybe. A dog.” That was one thing he always wanted that Dwight never allowed.)

  Dwight got mad when Ollie showed up in our bedroom wanting to get into bed with us, but I never minded that. Now I slept alone and dreamed of my son’s hot breath on my neck, his small damp hand curled around me, and his father, on the other side, murmuring, “So I guess we aren’t having sex tonight, huh?”

  Dwight had a temper, and more and more, over the duratio
n of our relationship, it was directed at me. But there had been a time when my husband, catching sight of me at a crowded party, or at a potluck at our son’s school, would have grinned the way Ava’s husband had when he’d spotted her across the room that night—smiled, then made his way across the floor to touch my back, or put his arm around me to whisper that it was time to go home, get to bed.

  Those days were done. Nobody noticed the woman holding the tray. Or hadn’t for a long time, until Ava.

  Now she was studying my face so hard I could feel my skin turning hot. I wanted to move away and serve some other guest, but when you’re talking with a person in a wheelchair that doesn’t seem fair. You can get away more easily than she can.

  “What’s your favorite picture you ever took?” she asked. Not necessarily the best, but the one I loved the most.

  “That would be this series I made of my son sleeping, the year he was three,” I told her. “I stood over his bed after he went to sleep and made an image of him every night for a year. He looked different in every one.”

  “You don’t do that anymore?” she said.

  I wasn’t usually like this—I was always a person to keep my problems to myself—but something about Ava, the sense that she actually wanted to hear what you had to say and cared when you told her, caused an odd reaction in me.

  I didn’t cry, but I must have had that look.

  “He doesn’t live with me anymore,” I told her, shading my face. “I can’t talk about it right now.”

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “And here I am taking you away from your work, too.”

  She motioned for me to lean down, to bring my face level with hers. She reached out and dabbed my eyes with a cocktail napkin.

  “There,” she said, sounding satisfied. “Beautiful once more.”

  I straightened, amazed that this lovely woman had called me beautiful.

  She wanted to know more about my photography. I hadn’t taken my camera out of the case in a year, I told her. The work I did at my job didn’t count.

  She wanted to know if there was a man in my life now, and when I said no, she said we had to fix that. She said “we” as if there was already a team here, with two players. Ava and me.

  The other part—the part about Ollie—was not a topic I intended to visit.

  “I’m not suggesting that a man solves everything,” she said. “But the other problems you have don’t seem so overwhelming when you go to bed every night in the arms of someone who adores you.” From the way she spoke, it seemed clear she had this with her husband.

  “And then there’s sex,” she said. A little way off, I could see the man whom Alice had told me was named Swift. He was engaged in conversation with an odd-looking woman—one of the artists, no doubt—wearing a piece of what appeared to be aluminum foil around her neck. He was nodding in a way that suggested he was trying hard to grasp what she was telling him. Just at that moment he caught Ava’s eye, and grinned at her. Perfect white teeth.

  “You must never lower your standards,” she told me. “Hold out for the real thing. If you don’t feel totally crazy about him, forget it. And if the day comes when it’s over, walk away. Assuming you can walk,” she said, with a laugh free of bitterness.

  Her remark suggested that I deserved something amazing and wonderful. An amazing and wonderful career, an amazing and wonderful partner and lover. An amazing life. I couldn’t imagine why this would be so.

  “You have to come over to the house,” she said. “You need to tell me everything.”

  5.

  Making the trip over to Folger Lane the next day—in Portola Valley, just two exits down the highway from my little apartment in Redwood City—I thought about Ava’s instructions. Tell me everything. I was always good at stories, so long as they weren’t mine. Not the real story, anyway. That one I kept under wraps, and the prospect that this woman who’d offered up such an unlikely invitation might seek it out had made me consider not showing up at all. Pulling my old Honda onto Folger Lane, I briefly considered making a U-turn and forgetting the whole thing.

  I had never been inside a house like the Havillands’. Not that it was opulent in the way some houses are, like houses that you see in magazines, or even on the very road where Swift and Ava lived. There was a kind of joyful abandon to the house—the soft white leather couches covered with embroidered Guatemalan pillows, the collection of Italian glass, and the erotic Japanese etchings—the vases spilling over with peonies and roses, the wall of African headdresses, and the incongruously traditional chandelier scattering rainbows over everything, the bowls of shells and stones, a conga drum, a collection of miniature metal race cars, dice. Dog toys everywhere. And the dogs themselves.

  There was so much evidence of life in the place—life and warmth. All of it seeming to emanate directly from Ava, as clearly as if the house were a body and she its heart.

  In the front hall, on a sideboard, was the most wonderful object: a pair of tiny figures carved out of bone, no more than two inches high but perfect in every way, on an intricately carved base formed into a tiny and beautiful bed. It was a man and a woman, naked, entwined in each other’s arms. I touched the piece with my forefinger, tracing the smooth curve of the female figure’s back. I didn’t realize it, but evidently I let out a long sigh as I did this. Ava noticed, of course. Ava noticed everything.

  “There’s that good eye of yours again, Helen,” Ava said. “Those are Chinese, twelfth century A.D. In ancient China, figures like these were presented to royalty on the occasion of a wedding, as a talisman for good luck.”

  Lillian and Sammy were kneeling at the foot of her chair as we talked. Lillian was licking Ava’s ankles. Sammy’s head was in her lap. Ava was stroking it. Ava had instructed her Guatemalan housekeeper, Estella, to put Rocco in the car for a half hour. “He gets overstimulated,” Ava said. This served as Rocco’s time-out.

  “I call these two figures the joyful fornicators because they look so happy together,” said Ava. “So you should touch this piece every time you come over.” Every time, she said. Meaning there’d be others.

  Lunch that first day was served in the sunroom by Estella (“my helper,” Ava called her), who set before us a tray of runny cheese, figs, and warm French bread, followed by a salad of pear and endive and a creamy roasted red pepper soup.

  “I couldn’t live without Estella,” Ava said, as the housekeeper retreated to the kitchen. “She’s a member of the family. Mi corazón.”

  Sitting in her chair across from me looking out on the garden—the sound of water running over the rocks, and birds, and happy dogs, and off in the distance, Swift on the telephone, having a conversation that involved a lot of easy laughter—Ava didn’t ask how, as someone who called herself a photographer, I’d found myself passing trays of spring rolls at an art opening. Or what had happened to the son whose sleeping face I’d once photographed every night for a solid year—the mention of whom, just one night earlier, had made me cry. When she offered me a glass of chardonnay and I told her I didn’t drink, she made no comment.

  I had dreaded the questions Ava might ask about my life. But she didn’t ask about the past. Ava wanted to hear what was happening now. She wanted to know what we needed to do to make me a happy and successful person, as I clearly was not at the moment. Since she seemed so gloriously happy and successful herself, I decided that day to follow her instructions. On everything.

  “We need to get you a life,” she told me. As if she were suggesting the purchase of a blouse or some interesting piece of kitchen gear from Williams-Sonoma.

  Here’s what I loved: Ava seemed more interested in who I was at that particular moment than where I had come from or what had brought me here. And in fact, this was true of her, too. Somewhere along the line I gathered that long ago, she had lived in Ohio, but in all the time we knew each other, I never once heard her mention her parents. If she had brothers and sisters, they were no longer relevant. If I hadn’t been so invested in
keeping my own story under wraps, I might have paid more attention to this aspect of my new friend, but as things were, it was one of the many things I loved about Ava, that I didn’t have to explain the old story. I could create a new one.

  The Havillands collected all kinds of things. Art, certainly. They owned a Sam Francis and a Diebenkorn, a Rothenberg horse and an Eric Fischl (names unknown to me before, but Ava eventually taught them to me)—also a Matisse drawing Swift had given her for their anniversary one year and a trio of erotic etchings Picasso had made in the last years of his life. (“Can you believe it?” she said. “The man was ninety when he created this one. Swift says that’s what he wants to be like when he’s ninety. A horny old goat.”)

  But it wasn’t just high-priced stuff that filled the Havillands’ walls. Ava had a weakness for outsider art (outsider art, outsider people), particularly work made by the kind of people, like the man at the coffee shop and the homeless people with dogs—and me, of course—who showed signs of having gone through hard times. On a prime spot, just below the Diebenkorn, hung a painting by one of the autistic artists from the gallery where we’d first met—a fishbowl, with a woman inside, staring out.

  Ava wanted to show me a collection of photographs they had acquired recently: a series of black-and-white portraits of Parisian prostitutes taken in the 1920s. Something in the face of one of the women, she said, reminded her of me.

  “She’s so beautiful,” Ava said, studying the photograph. “But she doesn’t know it. She’s stuck.”

  I studied the photograph more closely then, trying to find the resemblance to myself.

  “Some people just need a strong person in their life to give them a little encouragement and direction,” Ava said. “It’s just too hard, doing everything on your own.”